On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 10:40 -0500, Styma, Robert E (Robert) wrote: > I have a set of Video Tapes (reel to reel) which go > in a Sony Video Tape Recorder. I've still got a few of those. One or two of them even play back, still... > I got the machine working smoothly enough, but cannot get a stable > signal out of the box. I tried both the RF output and the video > outputs. I would like to get the tapes transferred to digital media > or at least VHS before they deteriorate too much. They are mostly > 1970's vintage. You want to use the video output. The RF output, on those decks, could be one of two things: A TV channel, which is further encoding of the video signal, and you'd need to decode back to video to record. You're adding more signal processing to the path, that wants to be avoided, particularly since they usually had a quite poor RF modulator. The FM signal directly from the video heads, which is only useful for a machine to machine dub, and that's two machines of the same model. > Do you thing a Time Base Corrector of the sort you can find on ebay > would have a chance of correcting this situlation? Possibly... It depends on various things, and what the "stability" problem is. A time base corrector can take out minor jitter, quite okay. But you'll be hard pressed to fix up servo hunting or tape wow (that's a continual moderate to slow motor speed changing). You may find some timebase correctors will not handle poor sources, at all, whether that be down to lots of noise or excessive time base errors, or other reasons. You could only try it to see. You'd probably need to get a full-frame TBC, not just something like a 16-line one, unless your VTR will lock up to external sync during playback. -- (This box runs FC6, my others run FC4 & FC5, in case that's important to the thread.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
